"Looking back to 2002–2004, we all felt that the consumer
Internet was played out. Nobody was starting consumer companies.
Yahoo! and AOL were the dominant portals, Amazon had staked its
claim on the e-commerce world, Google was well on its way to
search engine dominance, a bunch of ridiculous dot-coms had met
their deserving fates, and there didn’t seem to be much room for
anything else."

But then something interesting happened — social got off
the ground. During "Web 2.0," he points out, Friendster,
LinkedIn, Myspace, YouTube, and Facebook all launched. What first
seemed like a gap in innovation was merely a lull before a big
boom of new products and experiences for the web.

Elman sees a direct comparison with where mobile is now.
"It’s worth remembering that the global app market could be
generating $100 billion in revenue by 2020, according to App
Annie," he writes. "So mobile is far from dead."

Elman's point is that there are new apps powering
"compelling" and innovative experiences, and consumers are
actually giving them a try.

For example, there have been 13 non-game apps that have
risen to the top five slots in Apple's app store this
year: Greylock
Partners

Some of these apps were brief fads — like
meeting Down
To Lunch, which was powered by text spam. But others, like
Prisma, are genuinely innovative and use cutting edge
technologies, like "creative" machine learning.

"In reality, there are probably hundreds of core needs that
aren’t being met by mobile today, but which could be. I
don’t think we need to wait for a new platform to make these
kinds of magical new experiences happen," Elman
concludes.